Published: July 2013 From glue-covered sticks in Egypt hang two lives, and a question: How can we stop the slaughter of songbirds migrating across the Mediterranean? By Jonathan Franzen Photograph by David Guttenfelder In a bird market in the Mediterranean tourist town of Marsa Matruh, Egypt, I was…

When I told him I had made contact with one of his clients, he was confused, then spooked. “How?” he asked, with the frightened look of a man who realizes he has left a gas burner on at home. I said I thought I knew the names of several clients, and he appeared stricken while he declined to comment…

Bob Dole recently said that neither he nor Ronald Reagan would count as conservatives these days. It’s worth noting that John Locke probably wouldn’t count as a libertarian these days, either. Michael Lind had a column in Salon in which he asked, “[i]f libertarians are correct in claiming that they…

Elementary has gotten some flak for being the "lesser" modern-day Sherlock Holmes. But now that its first season is over, we're realizing this show understands the Arthur Conan Doyle canon — it's just not afraid to ask questions. Here's why Elementary is the Sherlock Holmes we never knew we always…

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America by David A. Stockman Pete Souza/White House President Barack Obama and Representative Paul Ryan at a bipartisan meeting on health insurance reform, Washington, D.C., February 2010…

Illustration by Lisa Hanawalt When I think of psychiatry, my first thoughts are unkind. I think of mildly sad people on antidepressants. I think of upper-middle-class parents putting their kids on Ritalin as soon as they flunk math, or misremember the lyrics to Dave Matthews songs. Pills seem so…

I don’t think there is a particular point at which I can say I became depressed. My illness was insidious, gradual and inexorable. I had a preview of depression in high school, when I spent a couple of years wearing all black, rimming my eyes in kohl and sliding against the walls in the hallways,…

Zeelenberg, a stocky man with a shaved head, led Stapel into his living room. “What’s up?” Stapel asked, settling onto a couch. Two graduate students had made an accusation, Zeelenberg explained. His eyes began to fill with tears. “They suspect you have been committing research fraud.” Stapel was an…

Returning with a new set to Edinburgh Bright Club, The Stand, 23rd April 2013.

As an online discussion about IQ or general intelligence grows longer, the probability of someone linking to statistician Cosma Shalizi’s essay g , a Statistical Myth approaches 1. Usually the link is accompanied by an assertion to the effect that Shalizi offers a definitive refutation of the…

Credit: Flickr/AfrikaForce As our closest relatives, chimpanzees have played a role in science for nearly 80 years. Because they can contract infections such as HIV and hepatitis, they have proved valuable for biomedical research. This research has revealed another trait, however, that chimpanzees…

When I was young and irresponsible, I met with the domestic policy team of a Democratic presidential nominee. To my suggestion that the candidate run on smarter crime control—and the gross failure of mere toughness as a strategy—the head of the team said, “No, crime isn’t our issue; it’s their…

Via youtube.com Adria Richards. A woman in the tech community identified people violating the stated Code of Conduct of the group. She was summarily run out of the community. Oh, wait, that wasn’t just this week, that was six years ago . A woman in the tech community takes her blog offline and stops…

Source Why are some brain disorders so common? Schizophrenia,autism and epilepsy each affect about 1% of the world’s population, over theirlifetimes. Why are the specific phenotypes associated with those conditions sofrequent? More generally, why do particular phenotypes exist at all? Whatconstrains…

What matters in stories about women scientists? By Christie Aschwanden Men dominate most fields of science. This is not news, and countless projects have sprung up to address the disparity. There are associations , fellowships, conferences , and clubs for women in science, and with these, efforts to…

This is a guest post by Lee Jussim . It was originally posted as a comment to the Beginning of History Effect, but it seemed too important to leave as a comment. It has been slightly edited to help it stand alone. Effect sizes may matter in some but not all situations, and reasonable people may…

Royal Bodies Hilary Mantel Last summer at the festival in Hay-on-Wye, I was asked to name a famous person and choose a book to give them. I hate the leaden repetitiveness of these little quizzes: who would be the guests at your ideal dinner party, what book has changed your life, which fictional…

Napoleon Chagnon, one of America’s best-known and most maligned anthropologists. Brian Finke for The New York Times Among the hazards Napoleon Chagnon encountered in the Venezuelan jungle were a jaguar that would have mauled him had it not become confused by his mosquito net and a 15-foot anaconda…

There is a “Skeptics In The Pub” event in Glasgow on March 4 th , where Dr Thom Scott-Phillips will be discussing the perceptions and misconceptions of evolutionary psychology, in light of the public backlash against it that seems to be increasing all the time. This kind of public engagement is very…

EDINBURGH, Scotland — Sometime in the fall of 2014, Scotland will hold a referendum on independence from the United Kingdom. The outcome is far from certain, but whatever happens, Scotland will certainly gain further powers of self-determination. Its capital city, Edinburgh (population 500,000), has…

Today, the top one per cent of incomes in the United States accounts for one fifth of US earnings. The top one per cent of fortunes holds two-fifths of the total wealth. Just one rich family, the six heirs of the brothers Sam and James Walton, founders of Walmart, are worth more than the bottom 40…

Mark Abramson for The Chronicle Review John Bargh rocked the world of social psychology with experiments that showed the power of unconscious cues over our behavior. A framed print of "The Garden of Earthly Delights" hangs above the moss-green, L-shaped sectional in John Bargh's office on the third…

Perry: Trump Still Better Than Hillary By Matt Wilstein Perry: Trump Still Better Than Hillary By Matt Wilstein Has Donald Trump finally become the “presumptive nominee” for the Republican Party? That was the question posed to former Texas Governor Rick Perry when he visited The View on Wednesday,…

Erin Pauwels Collection/Art Archive/Art Resource ‘A Sun of the Nineteenth Century’; cartoon from Puck magazine showing Charles Darwin as a shining sun, chasing the clouds of religion and superstition from the sky, 1882 1. The history of science is partly the history of an idea that is by now so…

Courtesy OWN Lance Armstrong, the Baseball Hall of Fame, and the Meaning of Sports A decade ago, supermen ruled the sports landscape. Sports Illustrated arrived at the end of 2002 with a cover featuring Lance Armstrong leaning on his bike and exuding the resolve that helped him beat cancer and then…

The financial crisis had many causes—too much borrowing, foolish investments, misguided regulation—but at its core, the panic resulted from a lack of transparency. The reason no one wanted to lend to or trade with the banks during the fall of 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, was that no one…

London, 1969: The worldwide reaction to the Biafran war gave rise to the modern humanitarian-aid industry. Credit Photograph by Evening Standard / Getty In Biafra in 1968, a generation of children was starving to death. This was a year after oil-rich Biafra had seceded from Nigeria, and, in return,…

I did not know Aaron Swartz , unless you count having copies of a person’s entire digital life on your forensics server as knowing him. I did once meet his father, an intelligent and dedicated man who was clearly pouring his life into defending his son. My deepest condolences go out to him and the…